Learn & Teach

Adult Courses

Sackler Adult Course: Your Busy Brain

February 22, 2014

Your brain is a bustling center of organization, choices, sustenance and complex cognitive reasoning—how does this busy mega-computer accomplish all these tasks? This one-day course will give participants an in-depth understanding of how our brains are wired to extract relevant information from the continuous stream of stimuli supplied by the world around us, and how it prevents itself from overloading and breaking down.

The Museum greatly acknowledges The Mortimer D. Sackler Foundation, Inc. for its support to establish The Sackler Brain Bench, part of the Museum’s Sackler Educational Laboratory for Comparative Genomics and Human Origins, in The Spitzer Hall of Human Origins.

In a corner of the exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, an elegant wire outline of the head of Diplodocus longus, a sauropod that lived in the Late Jurassic period about 156 million years ago, anchors a fascinating fossil: one half of a bony braincase, its interior carefully color-coded to denote various functional structures once within it.

Though honeybees are famous for producing honey, they also pollinate agricultural crops. Intrigued by these tiny pollinators, 16-year-old Jill decided to learn more about the role memory and landscape play in honeybee foraging and pollination.